Many researchers have criticized NIST for its attempt to explain the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers on 9/11.[3] Judy Wood’s Request for Correction[4] to NIST falls into three categories: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The purpose of this letter is to examine and highlight Wood’s legitimate as well as illegitimate criticisms of the NIST report. Although Wood’s RFC has some merit, it is demonstrable that a great portion of her request is problematic. In fact, many of Wood’s misleading arguments have been previously criticized, and she has yet to acknowledge any of her errors and misrepresentations. Ultimately, this is the worst failing of Wood’s RFC.[5]

The Good:

NIST should have performed a full finite element collapse analysis of the WTC towers. Many of NIST’s highly questionable and overreaching assumptions[6] that the WTC towers were indeed ‘poised for collapse’ could have been tested, at least in part, if they compared the modeled collapse to observation. A collapse model which does not match observation is a clear indication that the assumptions NIST used in their analysis are flawed and must be reconsidered. A credible ‘global collapse’ model must adequately explain the collapse time and other relevant characteristics observed during and after the collapse.

Dr. Judy Wood, in one section of her Request for Correction to NIST,[7] focuses upon the negligence of NIST to adequately describe the tipping top section of the south tower in the seconds immediately after collapse initiation. This problem has also been noted by other 9/11 researchers.[8] She correctly points out that the hand-waving arguments by NIST are overly cavalier[9] This is good.

The Bad:

However, Wood peppers even this valid general point about the tipping of the south tower with specifically false allegations. In her complaint, she states that “steel, concrete and rebar are literally pulverized,” implying in the next sentence that even the steel was turned to dust in the “disintegration of the tilted portion”.[10] There is no credible evidence that any appreciable amount of steel was disintegrated during the collapse. Furthermore, she claims that “the north wing of WTC4 appears to have been surgically sliced off from the main building and the main building has disappeared.”[11] Wood literally believes that 2/3rds of WTC4, including all steel, concrete, and office furnishings have vanished into thin air and pictures are presented where this fact is presumed self-evident. However, photographs have been publicly issued which directly indicate that there was significant debris stacked on the surface.[12] Furthermore, she gives no consideration to the volume of debris located in sublevel collapses where much debris likely resides. This is bad.

The Ugly:

Most of the points from her website which are reiterated in the Request have been thoroughly and comprehensively discredited.[13] A summary of the issues that she consistently refuses to redress are repeated below:

· The amount of power required to dissociate the steel in one WTC tower, not including any energy loss mechanisms, is well over 5 times the power output harnessed by human beings from the entire globe. Conservative estimates of energy losses swell the power requirements to at least 1000 times the earth’s power output. Obviously, no known power source is even remotely capable of accomplishing this feat. In an interview, Wood called these calculations a “distraction”, when in actual fact her entire hypothesis is a distraction until it can address this seemingly insurmountable deficiency.[14]

· All of the debris from damaged and collapsed buildings in the WTC complex (not including WTC 7) can be accounted for if sublevel collapses are included in the analysis.[15]

· No significant amount of steel was turned into dust since no abnormal elevated levels of iron were found in the USGS dust samples,[16] and no significant proportion of debris by weight “shot up into the upper atmosphere” as Wood claims before, during, or immediately after the collapse.[17]

· No known directed energy beam can possibly match the observations seen in the destruction of the WTC towers considering:

1. Symmetry of collapse

2. The lack of optical distortions from heating the air along any speculated beam path

3. No evidence of the massive amounts of scattering which would necessarily be expected from a directed energy beam

4. In the case of the North Tower, the antenna dropped first; indicating an internal structural failure[18]

5. The theory ignores many of the 11 features of controlled demolition that appear to be present (previously molten steel eutectic recovered from the WTC tower and WTC7 rubble with a thermite-analog signature,[19] eyewitness testimonies of explosions occurring before collapse initiation,[20] squibs, etc)[21]

6. The presence of iron-rich spheres along with chemical traces of thermite-analogs in dust samples as far away as the fourth floor of an apartment a football field away.[22]

· The volumetric compression expected from collapsed steel-framed buildings matches the amount of debris observed in the holes in surrounding buildings as well as from partially collapsed surrounding buildings. Furthermore, the damage is consistent with the impulse forces generated from falling debris.[23]

· Seismograph readings do not directly correlate to the potential energy of a building in any fundamental way for reasons which have previously been cogently explained,[24] and Dr. Wood’s misinterpretation of ‘short’ collapse times as measured by seismographs are an obvious artifact for the very same reasons.

· Much of the concrete was not turned to dust as evident from the Janette MacKinlay sample obtained and analyzed by Dr. Steven Jones (75% of the sample was greater than 1.3mm in size). Furthermore, figure 38 within the Request itself clearly shows many fist-sized chunks of concrete.[25]

Plausible explanations exist for the serial burning of cars parked close together and a specific example is given from ground zero. Previously burned vehicles on FDR were most likely towed to that location.[26] However, it is noteworthy that NIST has not reasonably explained this phenomenon.[27]

Contrary to assertions by Dr. Wood, paper did burn at ground zero. There are photographs of charred stacks of paper in the WTC rubble pile and eyewitness accounts of burning paper raining from the sky. The flames from vehicles would have surely ignited at least some paper in the vicinity, and the photographs on her website which show vehicles ablaze lack sufficient resolution to distinguish burning paper from other flaming organics that can occur on the ground beneath burning vehicles under normal circumstances.[28] Sheets of loose paper completely burn in a matter of seconds which may constitute the statistical reason that few photographs exist of distinguishable individual sheets of paper burning. The explanation for lack of photographic evidence of burnt single sheets of paper is elementary: spotting small, crumpled, black remains of burnt paper from photographs is near impossible upon a background consisting of various sorts of dark debris and dust. In short, paper was everywhere and in all conditions; this is certainly not unexpected.

Judy Wood puzzles over the fact that “the tires and even the pavement under the car are on fire.”[29] This may appear strange to someone who has never witnessed an actual vehicle fire. A video of a fire in the K-Mart parking lot shows a minivan aflame,[30] and illustrates several pertinent points:

· The pavement underneath the minivan is ablaze

· The car in the immediate vicinity of the minivan catches fire demonstrating how an entire parking lot or underground parking garage of cars parked close together, as is the case in NYC, can burn serially

· The driver-side front tire of the minivan is completely burned off

· The driver-side door handle is missing

· The burnt minivan resembles many of the same characteristics as burnt vehicles at ground zero including missing headlights and deformed hood

Furthermore, she erroneously presents a picture of a police cruiser in Figure 43 within the Request whose causal mechanism responsible for the rear-end charring of the vehicle was previously presented in photographs and published.[31] There were flames immediately behind the police car that presumably came from another vehicle that was aflame. Before and after pictures show the highly likely cause and effect, yet she insists on continuing to promote her misinterpretation by ignoring the published evidence.

The idea that vehicles which have been smashed and then moved is vividly illustrated by the analysis done by ‘totovader’ showing the Ladder 3 fire truck crushed by debris at ground zero.[32] However, Judy Wood on her website asks “why did this fire truck wilt?” implying that it could not have been crushed by debris and subsequently moved to a new location. The videos were released last year, yet the obvious misinterpretation remains on her website among a litany of other discredited items.

In an attempt to analyze the collapse times of the WTC towers (what she calls the ‘billiard ball’ analysis), the conservation of momentum and energy are flagrantly violated. She assumes that with each collision, all momentum in the problem is obliterated (figures 6 to 8). Her underlying assumptions are left unstated and the reader is left to ponder this egregious violation of physical law. There are only two possibilities to remedy this apparent lapse in reason. The first possibility is that no mass travels downward from previous impacts—a heinously false assumption since more than 50% of the tower mass fell on its own footprint as evident by the debris stack in the sublevel collapses in conjunction with the smaller contribution from the above ground rubble piles. The second possibility is that all velocity is obliterated in each collision, which is synonymous with annihilating all kinetic energy with each collision. This is impossible to justify since each progressively lower event will accelerate through the same distance (1 story in the case of figure 6) involving more mass, thus generating excess collisional energy greater than that necessary to ‘pulverize’ and ‘fail floor supports’ (as defined on page 3). This violates the initial assumption that all kinetic energy is necessarily obliterated at every impact event, thus proving her reasoning is logically flawed and her analysis violates the laws of conservation of momentum and energy.

Dr. Wood boldly asserts that “the Towers did not collapse.”[33] She states that the use of such terminology is “false, deceptive, and misleading” and should be stricken from NCSTAR1.[34] I might agree only if the word was even slightly misused. The definition of a ‘collapse’ is given by the American Heritage English Dictionary, Third Edition as:

Collapse (n.)

1. The act of falling down or inward, as from a loss of supports

2. An abrupt failure of function, strength, or health

The WTC towers fell down from a sudden loss of its supports suffering an abrupt failure of function and strength. In the common vernacular, no mechanism needs to be specified in order to correctly utilize the word. The collapse mechanism is precisely the topic currently being debated both within the 9/11 Truth movement and with NIST. Judy Wood’s nonsensical argument that the towers did not collapse is likely based on her unsupported and provably absurd claim that large amounts of the debris from the towers went up into the upper atmosphere during collapse.[35]

Dr. Wood’s greatest deficiency is only peripherally related to her reprehensible misinterpretation of data. Continually promoting thoroughly disproved notions with no statement of redress is unforgivable in the scientific community. Her repeated failure to even acknowledge the above stated points should cause grave concerns to any honest 9/11 researcher analyzing her work. Publicly submitting such a seriously flawed document to NIST is an embarrassment to the 9/11 Truth community. This is ugly.

“NCSTAR 1 has been disseminated so as to provide ‘influential information’ and should, therefore, at least adhere to the norms of common sense”[40]

‘Common sense’ often leads different people to contradictory conclusions. The entire purpose of a scientific study is to apply the rigorous methodology of science in order to remove subjectivity as much as humanly possible from observations. Ironically, many of Judy Wood’s criticisms not only lack a sound scientific basis, they lack common sense as well.

Fraudulence assumes motive. That is, fraud is the deliberate deception practiced for the purpose of gain. This accusation appears peppered throughout her publication without evidence supporting the claim. Wood has presented an incredibly weak case for indictment by leaving NIST’s motives unidentified.

Billiard balls: a case study in the violation of the conservation of momentum

Billiard ball analysis in Figures 6, 7, and 8

Duration of collapse: confusion of collapse times

“The WTC towers were destroyed faster than it would take them to drop to the ground in free-fall”[45]

Dr. Wood quotes the August Fact Sheet (Answers to Frequently Asked Questions) by NIST in stating:

“NIST estimated the elapsed times for the first exterior panels to strike the ground after the collapse initiated in each of the towers to be approximately 11 seconds for WTC 1 and approximately 9 seconds for WTC 2.”[47]

However, she quotes NIST: “Within 12 seconds, the collapse of WTC1 had left nothing but rubble.”[48] That is, 12 seconds compared with free fall of 9.2 seconds—contradicting her own argument that the buildings fell faster than free fall speed.

Many of the perceived discrepancies in the NIST report collapse times arise from confusion between ‘collapse time’ and the time it takes for the first piece of debris to hit the ground once collapse initiates. The fall time for debris in the vicinity of the impact zone where the first pieces of debris begin falling from the building is much shorter compared to the fall time of the roof. Dr. Wood attempts to use the shorter 9 seconds quoted by NIST as a ‘collapse time’ and erroneously argues that the data shows that, assuming the debris did not magically accelerate faster than g, some of the debris must have vanished before it hit the ground thus shortening the perceived fall time.

She attempts to substantiate her claim that the measured collapse times were much too short by showing pictures of raw seismic graphs (figure 3) and states:

“Columbia University’s Seismology Group recorded seismic events of 10 and 8 seconds in duration, which correspond to the collapses of WTC2 and WTC1, respectively.”

It has been shown, repeatedly, that seismic graphs do not effectively measure the energy released from a building collapse. There is no simple correlation between the potential energy of a building and the energy released into ground movement generated by the collapse.[49]

Buildings do not disappear since the problem dictates conservation of mass. Analysis of the sublevel collapses as well as the volumetric compression expected from a collapsed steel framed building show that the debris can plausibly reside in the sublevels and match observation. Since photographs only show the surface debris and not debris in the sublevels, the conclusion that the buildings disappeared is absurd in the extreme.

Secondly, Dr. Judy Wood contends that the WTC towers fell “upwards” since, she claims, most of the towers and building contents were sent into the “upper atmosphere” as the buildings were “turned into nano-dust”.[53] Apart from complete lack of evidence that any significant volume of debris ‘shoots up’ during the collapse, the mere idea violates Archimede’s principle, a scientific law which has been in existence since 250BC. In order for the buildings to fall up, the weight of the entire WTC Towers plus the modest increase in temperature of the air (which necessarily could not be that much since optical distortions are not visible in video footage) would necessarily have to weigh less than the air it displaces, a provably absurd assertion. This is the concept of buoyancy, a very basic physical principle.

“The ‘holes’ that are only adequately explained based on unusual energy effects, consistent with use of Directed Energy Weapons (DEW).”[55]

Some adjacent buildings suffered partial, localized collapses. These buildings were steel-framed buildings and were designed and constructed to maximize the mostly empty space by volume. For example, in WTC 6, an eight-story building with a large hole in which all eight stories appeared to have collapsed, the debris would only be expected to be about 1 story high (8 stories times the collapse ratio calculated for WTC 7, 11.5%) across the area of the collapse. One sublevel collapse could account for nearly all the debris from WTC 6. Three sublevel collapses may have occurred beneath WTC 6.[56] We do not expect to see much debris in the holes, and this matches observation.

The damage to the surrounding WTC buildings is consistent with the expected impulse damage from falling debris generated by the collapsing towers as explained in detail by Tony Szamboti.[57]

There is no evidence of what a ‘hole’ in a building from an ill-defined vague notion of a ‘directed energy beam’ should look like, so the presumption that the pictures are consistent with ‘directed energy beams’ is absurdly vacuous.

“Vehicles that are inexplicably burned as if toasted and found in unexplained places and at varying distances from Ground Zero; simultaneous lack of burning paper. Each of these widespread effects are unusual energy effects, consistent with DEW.”[66]

Since Dr. Wood refuses to suggest what types of energy weapons my have been used, it is impossible for her to suggest that burned and presumably crushed cares are consistent with any specific DEW. How are these effects consistent in any way with DEWs? Missing door handles, fires on the pavement, and burning tires are common for burning cars and are not anomalous.[67]

It is very presumptuous to assume that vehicles parked along FDR parkway were ‘toasted’ while parked in the same location. James Gourley demonstrates that it is likely that these burned cars were towed to that location from the vicinity of ground zero.[68]

The police car pictured in figure 43 was burned on the back end only due to the proximity of a fire located near the back end.[69]

The buildings were turned to dust: false, false, false

“degree of destruction of material that resulted in ‘Dustification’”[70]

“A large portion of the building was turned to dust – which does not make a “thud” when it lands, if it lands”[71]

“…the nearly instantaneous destruction of the building whereby steel, concrete and rebar are literally pulverized”[73]

“Steel turned to dust as literally as the buildings are being destroyed before our very eyes. These effects defy explanation other than that of DEW”[74]

A large portion of the buildings were not turned to dust. Dust samples from USGS clearly show that no significant amount of iron was dissociated from steel.[75] The power required to vaporize the steel in the upper 110 floors of the tower neglecting all energy losses is over 5 times the total power output of the earth. Furthermore, most of the concrete by weight was probably more like gravel than dust as is evident from a sample obtained by Steven Jones from Janette MacKinlay at 113 Liberty Street, just across from the South Tower.[76] 75% of the sample was greater than 1.3mm. In fact, in Figure 38, numerous large chunks of concrete are clearly visible although covered by surface dust, which is what is expected since lighter dust might be expected to settle to the ground last.

Conclusions

Although Wood’s Request for Correction to NIST has some valid points, these are mostly lost in a sea of misrepresentations. Her straw-man representations are then used to advance fictional and non-scientific arguments. Even worse, many of these claims have already been seriously critiqued by other 9/11 researchers without any response or acknowledgement by Wood.

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